Editing Tempo and Time Signature V1 in Cubase 12

today we talk about

Editing Tempo and Time Signature V1 in Cubase 12

Turning tempo track on off

Activate the toggle time base on a track

Look at the tempo track editor buttons and zones

Tempo editor toolbar

hello everybody Andrew Blake from The digitalaudiomanual.com Today We Begin a series of videos as we examine editing Tempo and time signature in Cubase 12. but before we start I want to remind you that there's a link below to the free content navigation guide which is an easy to navigate webpage with links to all the content on this channel and besides that in the near future I'm going to begin adding tips and other bits of information that will only be available there you know things like simple steps that will get you started and up and running quick things that are in the videos but are written down in simple steps that serve as quick reminders when you need information down the road if you're working with programs like wavelab or Cubase plugins or the cable guys shaper Box 2 and many many other projects that are in the works then I know you're going to find just like I have that this is an invaluable study Aid and the other thing I want to make sure you understand is that this is not a simple PDF this is a constantly updated page that has any information that that is new or anytime videos are changed really anything updated and once you have it you will always have the latest information constantly updated so if you haven't gotten it already go to the link below click on it and save it to your favorites it's my gift to you and it's absolutely free Okay so let's get started so this topic of editing the tempo and a time signature I think is promises to be uh very informative on many levels of course some of the stuff is going to be basic rudimentary on the other hand I'm hoping that we're going to accomplish in this set of videos doing things like being able to set up Tempo tracks to untempled material in order to be able to maybe set up music to you know stuff that you wouldn't think you could tie music to as I've been looking over the topics all of that stuff is uh involved here so I'm looking forward to that but let's start off with basic stuff as we get going here one thing to be aware of Cubase out of the box pretty much is set at a tempo of 120 and the time signature at four four so when you open up a project if you haven't changed anything that's the kind of thing you're going to have now on the other hand me personally I have changed you know my Tempo on all my projects I have it set at 128 currently uh you know a month from now I may start changing things to something different but what I do and I'm sure many of you do and if you don't I encourage you to is you know set up the things that you like in your project in this case uh on this discussion the tempo set it up to whatever Tempo you like and if you have a different time signature anything that you want different in your projects as you go forward and then save that project as a template in order to save projects as a template you kind of set it up up and then you go up to the file menu at the very top and there's an option as you go down it's called save as template and when you open that up you give it a name and say okay whatever but then every time you open up Cubase you can open up that template and everything will be already set up for you so if you haven't done that that's something you really want to consider doing so you have a couple of options on the tempo you have this thing called the tempo track or you have a fixed Tempo one of the things you can do if you go down to the bottom on the transport where it shows the actual Tempo there's like a little button that is the to the left of the actual Tempo numbers if you click on that it lights up but also if you hold Ctrl and click on that that's going to open up this Tempo track editor which we're going to be talking about a bit and up on the top here on the left you have a thing that says Tempo track and if you click on it it activates What's called the tempo tract this allows you to actually change Tempo you can draw in Tempo changes that kind of thing and when you turn it off it just stays at a fixed Tempo through the whole project some other things you'll want to pay some attention to as we go along when you have a track any one of these kind of either instrument audio tracks anything like that when you look up on the inspector there's a little music note here and this allows you to do what's called toggle the time base basically if you turn that off it's not going to follow any time changes you may make on the other hand if you turn it on and it lights up to a note now it's going to follow any time changes you put in here a couple other ways to open the tempo track when you need it go up to project run down to where it says Temple track and then also Ctrl T if you haven't changed it as your default shortcut key so let's take a quick tour of this thing on the very left you have this Tempo scale this actually shows you you know all the possible tempos up and down up on top you have a toolbar typically you can right click and add and remove different you know buttons and stuff below the toolbar you have an info line which you really won't see if you don't have this little button over on the right turned on something that show hides the info bar typical ruler Steinberg has where you can click and drag if you need to an area below the ruler where you can add time signatures and then this Tempo curve display which when you have you know things speed up or slow down Tempo changes it'll show a graph down here that you can adjust or move if you need to if you turn off that Temple track activate button then you can see this curve but you also have a straight line because now there's only one straight Tempo across the whole project let's look at our toolbar real quick it has a lot of The Usual Suspects up here of course like we said we can turn this Temple track on and off you have the option to turn the auto scroll on and off change the scrolling from a stationary cursor to page scroll or suspend it when editing any of those options as usual some of the usual tools you have your select tool draw erase and zoom tool you have a new Tempo type for the points here when you hit this little drop down you have three options a step the ramp or the automatic when it's on the step when you click a point and draw it that's what it looks like as little steps when you switch this to a ramp if you click on something and move it it kind of turns into a gliding ramp and the automatic is a rather smart feature because it kind of looks at the previous point and it will draw another Point similar to that so if I go to a ramp it's going to draw another ramp and if I'm by a step it's going to draw in another step you have a little display that shows the tempo which you can change and when you click and drag on a Tempo node type of thing it moves to the tempo up here so you can see actually where you're at and the cursor as it moves does the same thing so if the cursor is over a point that's higher it's going to show a higher Tempo on and vice versa when it's over a lower point then you have this snap on and off button comes on and off and next to it you have a drop down where you can kind of set whatever you want in terms of how you want it to snap like right now it's set one to one so it means it's going to click on a bar when it sets it you don't necessarily have to put on the draw tool because the pointer changes to a pencil when you get over you know the tempo line and then you can click and drag right away and just continue to draw as you want and then it turns back into a pointer as you need it so it's you know real convenient as far as a tool goes there's another button it's not showing up on my toolbar I have to right click to bring it up and it's called the tempo recording button when I click on that I now have this button that when I click on it it says start recording and it has a little slider which I can actually change the tempo as the song plays we'll be doing some of that so we're going to get into it later but great little option you have a process Tempo dialog which allows you to do more fine tuning in terms of picking where you want things to start and end just a bunch of options we'll be exploring these then you have a process bars dialogue same thing you're allowed to kind of put in you know more than one kind of time signature and insert them along a certain length of time and then like I said you have the show hide info line so you won't even see the info line if you don't have this pressed and then finally you have the setup toolbar little Cog thing where you can pick the buttons you want with the typical left divider right divider options meaning that buttons on the side of the left divider stay there buttons on the side of the right divider stay there and at the bottom of this there's a setup so if you want to change the way things are ordered or move them around you can do that in the setup all right there you go are you ready to start digging into the tempo track and the temple track editor and changing tempos and all the stuff that goes with it well that's what we're heading we'll be here for a little while but this is a very good subject and this is one that will prove beneficial in many many ways as usual if you haven't grabbed your navigation guide be sure to grab that from the link below it has links to all the content on this channel ever growing and free to use and it's there to try to make this whole learning experience a whole lot simpler you can find things in order by number so what did we do today we kind of looked at the tempo track turning it on and off we learned how to activate the toggle time base on a track look at some of the tempo track editor buttons and zones and finally finished up with that Tempo editor toolbar so there's some things to review I'm going to put all those notes in the navigation guide for easy review later all right as always I'm glad to have you guys here it makes it worth doing this I'll see you in the next video